10 Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks For 2022

You might be wondering: why would I need to know how to use Bing Ads effectively? Isn’t Google Ads enough for my business?

While the dominance of Google Ads in search advertising is undisputed, Bing Ads captures a decent amount of traffic.

Alexa rankings feature Bing in the top 50 most visited sites on the internet.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Alexa
Bing Alexa ranking

According to Microsoft’s user insights, Bing has a 34.7% share of the U.S desktop search market. It powers Yahoo and reaches 60 million searchers across industries not reached by Google.

These are significant numbers, and they could help you gain an edge over your competitors.

Bing Ads has a learning curve and needs to be optimized as well, especially when, as marketers, we have to justify our cost per lead (CPL) numbers. We are constantly chasing a lower CPL, a metric that almost defines how well we do our job.

The cost per click (CPC) figures for Bing Ads are lower than Google Ads, since it’s less competitive, and with an optimized ad listing, it can be used to improve the CPL.

Bing offers a number of cool features for advertisers, and it can get overwhelming to find out what works and what doesn’t. But leveraging Bing Ads to direct traffic to your site can be made quite easy with these 10 must-know tips, tricks & hacks:

1. Remarket to an interest group.

It is a very common possibility that a user will click on your ad, visit your site, and leave without taking action (opting in or buying a product).

These individuals expressed an interest in your business and shouldn’t be forgotten. In fact, brands on social media heavily rely on remarketing.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Remarketing
Bing Ads remarketing

Within Bing, you can define a category, action, label, and value in a custom event, and remarket to those who have interacted with your site. This is an extremely useful feature and ensures higher conversions than traditional methods.

Put simply: if you’re not remarketing (also known as retargeting), you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

2. Set automated rules.

Sometimes, keeping track of all your campaigns can feel like a tedious task. You should consider setting automated rules to let these campaigns run on your instructions.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Automate
Bing Ads automated rules

Bing Ads offers 13 types of rules, including:

  • pause or enable campaign
  • update budget
  • change bids
  • raise bid to the top of the page or to the first page
  • etcetera

Tweak parameters which define the how, when, and what of the rule, and you’re good to go.

These rules are available at the ad, keyword and ad group level. If combined with trends, you can use this automation to save cost and never miss a campaign opportunity.

3. Leverage local marketing.

A unique characteristic of Bing’s algorithm is the way it matches search queries locally. This is true even if the query doesn’t demand a local listing.

Businesses can use this feature to promote themselves in the area. Further, Bing identifies which of the similar advertisers performed best.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Local
Local ads (Canada)

It presents this information to you as a location targeting recommendation, which can be leveraged for additional cheap clicks.

Leverage local marketing by bidding on close variations of keywords such as grammatical variations, misspellings, and rephrasings.

4. Use the keyword planner tool.

You might feel tempted to use the same keywords for your Google and Bing Ads. However, it’s important to realize that there is a huge difference in the search volume of these two search engines.

Bing users can be classified as a unique group, and it is imperative that you do ample research on which keywords work on Bing.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Keyword Planner
Bing Ads Keyword Planner

In Bing’s keyword tool, Bing not only provides the keyword recommendations, but also lets you create a negative keyword list for your campaign.

You can also use a URL builder to add a tracking string to each component of your campaign. This will enable you to easily keep a tab on website metrics. However, it does require you to have some level of expertise in keyword tagging.

5. Use the Bing Ads Editor.

Bing has made campaign creation an easy task with the Ads Editor, a powerful offline management tool which can be used to make bulk changes in a short time.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Editor
Bing Ads Editor

It offers a range of useful features like:

  • selective pasting of settings for a campaign or ad group from Excel
  • update parts of an ad copy with the replace function
  • advanced search and ability to save it as a custom search
  • share budget between campaigns
  • identify opportunities, errors & warnings

6. Improve your quality score.

Staying relevant to the user queries over time is important.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Quality Score
Bing Ads quality score

Bing lets you assess the performance of your landing page, keywords, and ads. It uses a click-through-rate (CTR) score, ad relevance score, and landing page experience score to calculate an overall quality score.

You should aim for a score of 7 or above (on a scale of 1-10); this indicates that your ad is very competitive and has a higher than average CTR.

7. Import from CSV files.

The Bing interface doesn’t have a feature that lets you change bids based on your preferred set of metrics. But, it does allow you to upload a CSV file for quick bid and promo changes, Sitelink updates and code appendages.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - CSV Import

A CSV is often a marketer’s best friend, but you need to be quick with basic functions like Vlookup and filters. Once you are done with your updates, you can use the import feature on Bing’s site to import from the file.

8. Control ad scheduling.

If you’re an international business, a major source of concern could be reaching customers across different time zones.

Bing makes this easy to handle. Its ad scheduling can be used to assign different time zones to your campaigns. You can use the ad scheduling features to identify trends, and even break down the time into smaller segments for implementation.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Scheduling
Bing Ads scheduling

Moreover, unlike Google Ads, these settings can be done at the ad group level, which saves you the hassle of creating a new campaign for scheduling changes.

9. Target LinkedIn profiles.

Bing Ads is the only search advertising platform that allows you to target LinkedIn profiles outside of LinkedIn itself.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - LinkedIn Targeting

You can use the campaign management tool available with Bing Ads to promote your business to other businesses. As LinkedIn is a professional network, you can reach out to a smaller yet highly relevant audience.

This can be phenomenal for those of us struggling with campaigns and are clueless on our next steps to drive lead acquisition.

10. Spy on the competition.

It is always a good idea to be aware of your competitors’ actions – notably, their keyword targeting and ad copy.

Bing Ads Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Spy on Competition
Bing Ads Auction Insights

You can use Bing’s auction insights to find out how your ad compares to a competitor’s ad. This tool is powered by machine learning and allows you to drill down options on performance and location.

You can also use a specialized PPC spy tool (these are some of the best) to get even more helpful data about your competition.

This analysis can help you evaluate your content strategy and tune it according to the audience preference.

Other Ideas

You can use Bing Ads to generate traffic to your website, a cost-effective alternative to the usually preferred social media.

Almost 40% of the Bing network audience is 35-54 years old; this mature age group is difficult to reach through other online channels. You can redirect a portion of your ad expenditure from Facebook & Twitter to a Bing Ad which leads to your site.

Despite popular belief, e-mail marketing is not dead. You can use this traffic to build an email list. It is a powerful method of lead generation, and is arguably more effective than social media in acquiring customers.

Conclusion

For those of us familiar with Google Ads (formerly AdWords), the Bing Ads interface might seem like too much to handle. It is full of features and can be overwhelming.

Knowing the right way to navigate through Bing can help you in the long run. If your cost per lead has been stagnant for a while, Bing’s lower competition and higher click-through rates might come to your rescue.

We highly recommend implementing some of these tips, tricks and hacks in your next Bing Ads campaign. Good luck!

If you have experience with Bing Ads, what is your best tip that I haven’t covered here? Drop it in the comments!

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